The Complete Guide to The Dark Knight and its Sequel, with over 380 posts! Director Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine all return, with the late Heath Ledger as the infamous Joker, Aaron Eckhart as Harvey Dent and Maggie Gyllenhaal as Rachel.Buy The Dark Knight:Blu-ray | DVD | Special Edition Blu-ray with Bat-pod

Speak­ing to MTV, Nolan answered ques­tions about Bat­man 3, specif­i­cally, is a July 2012 pre­mière and March 2011 film­ing on the cards?

Nolan answered,

“Yes and no, I sup­pose, would be the answer. We know we would be aim­ing for 2012, and that’s been talked about, but we’re just work­ing on the script really. My brother’s been hard at work on it for quite some time, based on a story that myself and David Goyer have written.”

The skinny is, there is no news. No script, no cast­ing, noth­ing. Bat­man 3, or The Dark Knight sequel, how­ever you wish to refer to it, will not be made before 2011. Though he did rule out Johnny Depp.

“There is nobody, there’s no script, there’s noth­ing. […] It can’t pos­si­bly be made before 2011 because ‘Incep­tion’ is such a big picture.”

[…]

“Johnny Depp is great in any­thing, but there is no Johnny Depp in this Bat­man. They tell me in no uncer­tain terms.“

High­lights include over 10M unique par­tic­i­pants across 75 dif­fer­ent coun­tries through ‘even­tiz­ing’ the web, for instance the use of cell phones ring­ing from within cakes in Bak­ery stores. All in all it kept The Dark Knight in the news and alive and well on the inter­net for over a year, lead­ing up to the July ’08 release.

Just to pro­vide you with a bit of con­text for The Dark Knight sequel, Warner Bros. have announced that Chris Nolan’s next movie, “Incep­tion”, will be released on July 26th 2010. This falls in direct com­pe­ti­tion with Marvel’s Thor movie.

The results are in for the 2009 81st Acad­emy Awards — Heath Ledger has won the Oscar for Best Actor in a Sup­port­ing Role for his por­trayal of the Joker. The Dark Knight also picked up another award for Best Sound Edit­ing. In The Dark Knight’s six other nom­i­na­tions it often lost out to either the Curi­ous Case of Ben­jamin But­ton or Slum­dog Mil­lion­aire, the lat­ter of which won 8 in total includ­ing Best Pic­ture and Best Director.

On the eve of Oscars night 2009 The Dark Knight’s total inter­na­tional earn­ings soared past the one bil­lion mark, one of only four films to ever do so (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, Titanic and Lord of the Rings: Return of the King being the oth­ers). The re-release in IMAX loca­tions finally tipped The Dark Knight over the final élite boundary.

What a day to be com­par­ing the $1bn mak­ing Dark Knight with films such as Titanic and Return of the King — movies that swept the Acad­emy Awards up in stun­ning fash­ion — each grab­bing 11 Oscars includ­ing Best Pic­ture and Best Direc­tor; mak­ing the Academy’s 2009 Best Pic­ture and Best Direc­tor Dark Knight snubs even more galling. As it is, all our chips lie on the Best Sup­port­ing Actor where we are all cross­ing our fin­gers and hop­ing that Heath Ledger can pick up that much deserved posthu­mous Oscar award for his stun­ning por­trayal as The Joker.

Other cat­e­gories include: Art Direc­tion, Cin­e­matog­ra­phy, Film Edit­ing, Makeup, Sound Edit­ing, Sound Mix­ing, and Visual Effects. The Dark Knight could win a total of 8 awards, which would be a grand enough sweep minus the big two, although this is pre­dicted as very unlikely.

As expected, and in fol­low­ing the Bat­man Begins to The Dark Knight jour­ney, Christo­pher Nolan is tak­ing some time out from Bat­man to pur­sue another movie — “Incep­tion”. Do not fret, The Pres­tige was filmed between the first two Bat­man movies and this cer­tainly does not rule Nolan out from a third movie. What’s more, Warner Bros. are pro­duc­ing “Incep­tion”, keep­ing every­one happy.

“Incep­tion” is billed as “a con­tem­po­rary sci-fi actioner set within the archi­tec­ture of the mind”, with an orig­i­nal screen­play by Nolan it plans to begin shoot­ing this sum­mer with a sum­mer 2010 release in mind.

Bear­ing this news in mind, the ear­li­est point at which pro­duc­tion on The Dark Knight sequel might begin is Sum­mer 2010, and with pro­duc­tion tak­ing approx­i­mately 14 months it could be late 2011 or Sum­mer 2012 before the caped cru­sader returns to theaters.